The Executive Secretary of National Board for Technical Education, NBTE, Professor Idris Bugaje has lamented that the operations of the agency are being hampered by inadequate manpower.
Bugaje disclosed this on Friday in Abuja when he appeared before the House of Representatives Committee on Federal Polytechnics and Higher Technical Education to defend the 2025 Budget of the agency.
He stated: “The operations of the agency are being hampered by inadequate manpower to carry out its mandate; as such, there is need to have more staff to do the job.
“For personnel, we are looking for an improvement because we have about 700 institutions to visit and our staff strength is at 330, which is very low.
“Similar agencies like ours have more staff, fewer institutions and more funds to carry out their duties, but our personnel cost is very low, so we want that one to be increased so that we can inject more hands to do that rotation.”
Speaking on the agency’s Internally Generated Revenue, Bugaje said there were charges being paid by institutions, which he said are not constant.
“It’s only when we go for accreditation we charge service charge. Before it was N 75,000, we have increased to 150,000 per program.
“And then we give 50 per cent to the federal government. For the whole year we ended up with N25 million in IGR. Which is dismally low.”